Datadog Agent

Why deploy Datadog Agent on Render?

Datadog Agent is a lightweight software component that collects metrics, traces, and logs from your applications and infrastructure, then sends them to the Datadog monitoring platform. It solves the problem of observability by giving you visibility into application performance, resource usage, and distributed system behavior across your services.

This template deploys Datadog's Docker agent as a pre-configured private service, giving all your Render services a shared endpoint for APM tracing and DogStatsD metrics without managing agent infrastructure yourself. Instead of figuring out the right Docker configuration, port mappings (TCP 8126 for APM, UDP 8125 for DogStatsD), and private networking setup, you get a working agent URL immediately—just add your API key. Render's private services handle the internal networking automatically, so your other services can send traces and metrics without exposing the agent to the public internet.

What you can build

After deploying, you'll have a Datadog agent running as a private service that any other service in your Render account can send traces and metrics to. Point your applications at the private service URL on port 8126 for APM tracing or port 8125 for DogStatsD metrics, and the data flows to your Datadog dashboard. You'll need to add your Datadog API key as an environment variable before the agent can forward data.

Key features

• Dockerized Datadog Agent: Deploys Datadog's official Docker agent as a private service on Render, providing a managed APM infrastructure.
• APM/Distributed Tracing: Exposes TCP port 8126 for application performance monitoring and distributed trace collection across services.
• DogStatsD Metrics: Supports custom metrics ingestion via DogStatsD protocol on UDP port 8125 for application-level instrumentation.
• Multi-Service Monitoring: A single agent instance can capture telemetry data from multiple services within your Render account.
• Private Service Networking: Runs as a Render private service with internal URL routing, keeping monitoring traffic off the public internet.

Use cases

• Backend engineer traces slow API requests across multiple Render services
• DevOps lead consolidates metrics from all microservices into one dashboard
• Platform team monitors application performance without managing agent infrastructure
• SRE debugs latency issues using distributed tracing across service boundaries

Prerequisites

• Datadog API Key: Your Datadog API key used to authenticate and send metrics, traces, and logs to your Datadog account.

Next steps

1. Configure the DD_API_KEY environment variable in your Datadog agent service with your Datadog API key — The service restarts and logs show 'Agent started' without authentication errors
2. Update one of your application services to send traces to your private service URL on port 8126 (e.g., datadog-agent-xxxx:8126) — Within a few minutes, traces appear in the Datadog APM dashboard under your service name
3. Test DogStatsD metrics by sending a custom metric from your app to port 8125 on the agent URL — The metric appears in Datadog Metrics Explorer within 2-3 minutes

Resources

• Datadog official site